Monday, September 3, 2012

I LOVE my SmartBoard!!

Every teacher friend I have has a SmartBoard and uses it on a daily basis. (If you do not have a SmartBoard I am so sorry!! At least 80% of all my lessons have an element where we use the SmartBoard! I really do not think I would be as an effective teacher without this amazing tool.) Since the SmartBoard is such an important part of my teaching life I wanted to show you show you some of my favorite sites I use and some of the SmartBoard Notebooks I have set up to use with my kiddos.

The Class DoJo website allows you to keep track of all the positive and negative behavior that is occurring in your classroom. You can view it where the kiddos can see both their negative and positive behavior points or the view that shows the scores combined (every negative point takes away a positive point). We keep track all week and then on Friday afternoon if the students DoJo has more negative points than positive points they get to go to Responsibility Club. (Responsibility Club is where kiddos with positive behavior get to go to one classroom where they can choose any activity they want to do (coloring, blocks, games on the SmartBoard, etc). The kiddos who had more negative behaviors have to go to the classroom where they have to make up work they did not finish through out the week or extra worksheets they have already done.)

The site even allows you to change all the setting to what positive/negatives you care about in your
classroom. I did not like "disruptions" so much as I like "talking excessively".

You can change the icons and make as many of each as you want. To top it off, the site allows you to email each parent the students behavior as often as you want (I do weekly so every Friday afternoon my parents receive an email).

The people who run the site seem really great too. They have a section entitled "New Features" that allows you to see what they are working on to improve the site and allows you to give your own suggestions. This is my first year using DoJo and already I see my kiddos enjoying it and it making a better impact than my previous green, yellow, red light system.
(Side bar-- My kinder-team and I made a DoJo reward system. When a kiddo reaches so many positives they get a reward (stickers, pencils, big chair, all the way up to eating lunch with the teacher).

They have an alphabet/phonics video, a video for each letter of the alphabet with its name, phonogram sound, and words that begin with it. They also have sight word videos and counting videos. On the side bar they have categorized it into subjects or grade level. My kiddos watch the letter of the day that we learned video and the alphabet video each day during snack. They LOVE the upbeat music and really get into singing along!

They also have their website you can check out and see what they are all about.

Barnes & Nobles has a section on their site for Online Stories read by the author. I think they try to put a new one up every month. It's really fun for the kiddos to watch because they see the author and how the author intended for the book to be read. My kiddos wanted to watch The Pigeon Wants a Puppy every day last year they loved it so much!

So these are SOME of my favorite sites. As I find/use more great sites I will blog about them too. I am also going to make a post about some of the things I do on Smart Notebook. (I just realized my home computer does not have the program so none of my files will open up, sad face!!)

2 comments:

Hello there!

My name is Jody and this year will be my 4th year teaching Kinder! I love that my job is to fisilitate a classroom that has a foundation which allows kiddos to grow into readers, writers, and math wizards!